• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 17, 2023

“It's a dumb article that you wrote,” a reader commented after I published one about the futurists who have influenced how I think about media, especially as a trade journalist.

“Rambling,” he concluded.

Thank you, that was what I was going for.

And even if the reader is a douchebag, he is also right.

He may use it in a disparaging way, but he gets me.

But enough about him.

“So what have you been writing?,” Thaddeus Rutkowski asked as he sat across from me in the dimly lit back of the Old Town Bar on a particularly sunny day last week.

“Thad, I’ve only ever had one story,” I told him. “And I’ve been writing it ever since.”

That’s also true.

As a journalist, it’s been one developing story about an industrial revolution -- the one caused by the rapid evolution of media -- and how people use it to influence how other people think, feel and behave. Usually for profit.

In terms of my personal writing, something like that.

This may seem like a dumb way to begin an article about a special, limited-time newsletter that MediaPost is kicking off today, but I couldn’t think of a better way.

I’m basically writing it to warn readers about the parts that are most likely to ramble -- like this one -- so they can decide for themselves if they want to read them.

To help manage that, I plan to organize the newsletter's content in an old-school editorial style, like a magazine.

Features, sidebars, mainbars, photos, covers, exclusive interviews, news analysis, reviews and critiques, and maybe even some literary things, an occasional real-life funny, and most likely, a whole bunch of numbers and stats shedding light on some marketplace epiphany or another.

Kind of what I try to do all the time on MediaPost, but distilled into 20 daily editions ending May 12.

To help identify the rambling parts you might want to avoid, I'm going to make it easy and serialize them with a highly visible graphic (see below), starting with No. 1 for this post.

I realize some of you may think I'm the real douchebag by doing this, but I mean it seriously. I genuinely don't want to waste anyone's time with more of my drivel than they need.

So thanks for putting up with this column, because it sets up the rest of what of what I want to achieve with this publishing project.

Most of it will be fairly conventional MediaPost journalism focusing on the this year's newfront marketplace, including columns and stories written by myself, Wayne Friedman, Karlene Lukovitz and Adam Buckman, as well as any MediaPost staffers or contributors who have something to add.

As a bonus, we're going to throw in a series special weekly reviews of the remaining episodes of "Succession" by long-time advertising and media critique Barbara Lippert.

The newsletter is called MediaPost Live At The Newfronts.

Actually, it has three names -- Road To The Newfronts, Live At The Newfronts, and After The Newfronts -- and there's a funny sidebar about why if you want to read rambling No. 2.

It explains the origin story that led up to a newsletter that leads up to and all the way through the newfronts.

If you want to read more about my conversation with Thad Rutkowski, you can read No. 3 here.

And because sometimes I grow so tiring, I'll leave it off here.

I've got one thing I got to do.